Of course that doesn’t tell the whole story. Fair admission increased by $1 this year (for an $11 walk-up adult price). Many school districts resumed classes in the middle of the fair. Yet the weather was nearly perfect.

I found Linsey Heister and her grandmother, Judy Andersen, both from Maquoketa, each finishing off a slice of free pie in the Elwell Family Food Center. The two women and the rest of their family had spent the entire run of the fair bunked in the campgrounds — an Andersen tradition since 1966.

“We’re kind of, you know, checking the list, seeing if there’s anything left, having our last corn dog,” Heister, 21, a graphic design student at Iowa State University, said of her Sunday agenda.

A fair checklist (or bucket list) sometimes requires decades. We talk about icons such as the butter cow as if every fairgoer sees them every year, but of course that’s not the way people sample their way through this smorgasbord on steroids.

Jim Weise, 55, a physician from Iowa City, stood in line at the Richard O. Jacobson Exhibition Center to purchase a $5 ticket to the popular Percheron horse show. He grew up in Iowa and has regularly attended the fair in recent years — yet somehow had avoided riding the double Ferris wheel at all until Sunday. (The double Ferris wheel is to the State Fair skyline what the 801 Grand skyscraper is to downtown Des Moines.)

By contrast, Phyllis Stegman of Des Moines celebrated her recent 90th birthday the way she has celebrated the last 39 years: with a ride down the Giant Slide.

She almost missed her ride this year because of recovery from colon surgery, until her doctor gave his OK Thursday. So Stegman slid Friday evening. “It was fun — oh, it was fun,” Stegman reported Sunday.

“I thought it was 104 steps,” she added of the long walk up to the top of the slide, “and it was 106.”

Stegman grew up on the south side of Des Moines, she said, and her parents handed down their love of the fair: They spent their honeymoon here in a tent.

There are more little dramas and histories tucked away among these fairgrounds than we can hope to capture in a given year — almost as many as there are strips of bacon.

For instance, congrats to Dustin Beener and his Hardenbrook family food stand that celebrated its centennial at this year’s fair. Beener, of Urbandale, is the fourth generation to run the concessions company.

The politicking of the 2014 fair essentially began a year early Sunday when Republican Scott Brown, a former Massachusetts senator, roamed the 2013 fair on its final day with his quintessential rolled-up shirt sleeves and butter cow photo opportunity.

And of course the fair’s No. 1 drama this year starred the butter cow — two years after the dairy mega-attraction celebrated its own centennial. Butter cow nation was aghast as protesters sloshed red paint on the cow, apparently to decry animal slaughter.

In response, the Blue Ribbon Foundation churned out about 6,000 “Butter Cow Security” T-shirts at $17 apiece in less than five days of the fair (starting at 3 p.m. Wednesday).

(Anybody willing to bet whether a butter cow-themed concert/rally next year could fill the Grandstand? Quirky, creative New York band They Might Be Giants strikes me as an act that would love to play along. A revue of bands could play appropriately reworded cover tunes: the Beatles’ “I Should Have Known Butter,” Abba’s “Dairy Queen,” Robin Thicke’s “Buttered Lines” and so on.)

But was the butter cow truly maligned by animal-rights protesters? Carole Rocco of Des Moines approached me with an intriguing conspiracy theory last week as I gabbed with readers at the fair alongside three of my fellow Register columnists: What if the perpetrators of the butter cow attack in reality were meat-industry allies using “Iowans for Animal Liberation” — a group that until then nobody had heard of — as a ruse to discredit the animal-rights movement with such a heinous act in its name?

Rocco’s suggestion had my mind reeling back to the heyday of “The X-Files” in the 1990s. I guess it took a long time for the government to admit that Area 51 exists, but I just can’t be paranoid enough to apply such elaborate stealth to anything having to do with dairy sculptures.

Even though the butter cow persevered through its Pollock-style coat of paint, its days are numbered nonetheless. As usual, the cow will be melted down and dismantled this week and its cooler shrine switched off.

To get technical, probably fewer than 1 million people peeped at the cow in person this year, since not every fairgoer visits each attraction.

But who’s counting? (Other than Phyllis on the Giant Slide?)

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).